Beware the kid who posts pictures of champagne online – it simply isn’t worth going after any of their parents’ cash. (Posed by models.)
Photograph: Photolyric/Getty Images

It’s hard to think of news sweeter than reports about how the “rich kids of Instagram” – the preening, materialistic, status-obsessed douchebags whose self-awareness is so profoundly lacking that they have inadvertently become their own meme – are inadvertently ruining their parents’ lives.

Cybersecurity firms use social media evidence of wealth in up to 75% of their litigation cases. So when your obnoxious children Instagram a selfie next to your gold-plated Ferrari, they’re telling the world exactly how rich you are. It’s a security nightmare – opening you up to fraudsters, lawsuits and divorce claims alike – but still they persist. So, let’s look at some of the most pervasive Instagram rich-kid tropes, and see what they reveal about the Rich Parents of Instagram’s assets – and how they could be used against them...

Chanel is everywhere

The rich kids of Instagram are some of the most strangely Chanel-fixated people on Earth. Sure, they take endless pictures of shopping bags, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You don’t have to delve too hard into the oeuvre to see that they’ll take pictures of anything if it’s got the Chanel logo on it. Often, this even extends to cake. You’d be staggered by the number of dimwitted debutantes who stand for photos next to cakes iced with the famous double-C. You know how you wanted a Spider-Man cake when you were little, and your mum made you Spider-Man cake, and it was the happiest birthday of your life? These people are just like that, except Spider-Man was a crime fighter with superhuman powers and not an expensive fashion brand worn by obnoxious goons, and also you were six and these people are legally entitled to vote.

Rich kids will take pictures of anything if it’s got the Chanel logo on it. Photograph: Alamy

Wasted champagne is telling

Beware the kid who posts pictures of champagne online. It simply isn’t worth going after any of their parents’ cash. Because have you seen the champagne photos that these people take? They don’t drink champagne in any of them. Visible champagne consumption is for pretenders. Instead, they just pour it. They pour it on people. They pour it on things. Sometimes they just turn the bottle upside down and tip the whole thing on the floor, and then wave the bottle around like the monkey from the start of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. A kid who burns through champagne this wastefully must have picked up the habit somewhere. Chances are their parents have already spunked everything they own. Good luck seizing any assets from them, buster.

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Pools win prizes

If financial investigators are really keen to catch out the parents of these preening dullards, they could do a lot worse than to examine their endless photographs of impractically tiny rooftop infinity pools. These photos – if you look past the gormless Wayfarer-wearing Joey Essex-alike pouring champagne off the roof in the foreground – might reveal the location of several hidden assets. Not only that, but you’re likely to see them without their tops on, which might help you assess their level of physical fitness in case you’re tempted to engage them in a foot chase.

Cash is a security risk

If your child has ever photographed themselves standing next to a pile of cash, you have given birth to the world’s dimmest nimrod. Not only are they saying that you are rich, they are saying that you haven’t even bothered to do anything with your wealth. It’s just lying around on the floor in great big piles, like you took the opening titles of Duck Tales as a weird asset management documentary. If anyone – thieves or fraudsters or competitors or aggrieved former spouses – were to see these pictures, they wouldn’t even have to try and part you from your riches. They could simply bung a hoover through your letterbox and have at it.

If your child has ever photographed themselves standing next to a pile of cash, you have given birth to the world’s dimmest nimrod. Photograph: Andrew Howe/Getty Images

License plates are a giveaway

There’s an entire scale of douchey vehicles on the internet. It goes: car, then sports car, then golden sports car, then yacht, then yacht full of attractive people having fun, then yacht full of people who are bored because it’s only a yacht, then private jet, then private jet full of identical twentysomethings all looking out of the window in a weird pastiche of intellectual depth. Whatever the vehicle, though, you can guarantee that these prats have also snapped an identifying plate of some description.

Sunglasses never come off

Every single rich kid of Instagram wears sunglasses, regardless of where they are. It doesn’t matter if they are indoors, or in church, or in some sort of futuristic military prison’s retina-scanning station. They will never remove their expensive sunglasses. This is partly because they only go on holiday to exclusive resorts in warm locations, and partly because they don’t want anyone to see how hollow and utterly devoid of life their eyes are. The opportunities for monetary acquisition are endless here. Since they are so used to life behind shades, why not try running up behind them and knocking their aviators off? They’ll be so confused and disorientated by the glare of normal light that they won’t notice you confiscating all their parents’ antique vases.

Watches are useless

Nobody really wears watches any more, do they? This douchebag owns a ton of them, though. He owns so many of them that he can’t even wear them properly. Look at him, dumbly stuffing six on to each hand like a useless Swiss knuckle-duster. What an idiot. However, if he has an interest in one outdated status symbol, he probably has loads of others. What else are you going to defraud him out of? His fax machine? His collection of bejewelled beepers? That needlessly large display of gold-painted Amstrad E-M@iler phones? This is a lost cause, and you know it.

Receipts reveal all

This, despite everything we’ve been taught about basic internet security, is still a thing. A doltish young buck, hairless and pouting, will clatter through the doors of an annoying boutique. Then, once they’ve drained the place of its most unnecessary items, in a show of brazen materialism, they’ll photograph their receipt and post it online. Now the world not only knows what vast amounts of cash they have access to, but where they spend it and what they spend it on and – sometimes, in truly stupid cases – a vast majority of their personal details. Fire away, lawyers. With kids this dumb, it’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel.